String Theory Seminar: Gary Horowitz (UCSB) “Boundary Causality Violating Metrics in Holography”

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The full bulk path integral in a Lorentzian formulation of holography includes metrics that violate boundary causality. This leads to the following puzzle: The commutator of two field theory operators at spacelike-separated points on the boundary must vanish. However, if these points are causally related in a bulk metric, then the bulk calculation of the commutator will be nonzero. It would appear that the integral over all metrics of this commutator must vanish exactly for holography to hold. This is puzzling since it must also be true if the commutator is multiplied by any other operator. We give a prescription for the bulk path integral in which resolves this puzzle. In this approach, the bulk dual of the boundary commutator is not the limit of the naive bulk commutator.